Hiding in plain sight: fawn!

It's the time of the year when every morning's trip into your deer-visited garden might be extra-exciting...

...when mother deer decide that your yard is a safe place for a nighttime delivery and leave a fawn or two "hidden" for the day.

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I've read that newly-born deer have a "freeze" strategy for the first two days of their lives...

...so when threatened they don't move a muscle. This allows for some great photo opportunities. (After two days they are strong enough to get up and run when nervous...)

This strategy along with their camouflage is remarkably effective, since I walked by this babe a couple of times before noticing it. How exciting!

I was using a telephoto lens so wasn't as close to the animal as it may seem, as I didn't want to frighten it too much.

Here's where it was hiding in the context of my garden:

From another angle it's easier to see:

From the deck you'd really need to know where to look (with binoculars or 300mm lens as I was using)...

...until early evening when mom returned. From my past experiences with hiding fawns, once they start raising their heads and looking around, mom is approaching.

That's the direction that mom will be coming from...

I got lucky and the little one looked directly at me (after I moved to get a better angle)!

A few minutes later when I tried to go back out on the deck as silently as possible my crying cat snuck out the door with me, made lots of noise and spooked the pair of them.

Because of the long lens and lack of time to adjust camera settings I was not able to capture good images of them, just terrible blurry artistic ones.

I'm still on the lookout for more fawns every morning, but I've never seen two in my garden in the same year. I wonder if that's intentional, where mothers avoid areas where the scent of fawns still lingers?

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